This week’s techmail is FreeBSD 8.0 installation walk-through where I take a look at a quick install of FreeBSD 8.0. I’ve toyed with FreeBSD for many years and it’s never really appealed to me beyond a curiosity because Linux is so capable. I’ve also gotten used to (or spoiled by, perhaps) the GNU command line tools and the BSD equivalents for a lot of things just seem… dated. Anyways, every major FreeBSD release that comes out I like to fiddle with a little bit just to see what’s going on, and every time I’m always amazed that they have the exact same installer. =) If you’ve never played with FreeBSD or any BSD system (excluding OS X) and you like to tinker, FreeBSD is pretty fun to goof around with (probably plenty fun to use as well, but I don’t see a personal need for that when Linux does what I want for the most part, and OS X does what I want for the rest).
Category Archives: Other Systems
DIY pfSense firewall system beats others for features, reliability, and security
This week’s TechMail was DIY pfSense firewall system beats others for features, reliability, and security which takes a look at pfSense which is, in my opinion, one of the best open source firewall systems around. I’ve used quite a few, and for a long time when I was developing Annvix, used it as a firewall (using shorewall), but pfSense has so much slick awesomeness to it that once I found it and played with it, I’ve never looked back. I’ve got a few pfSense firewalls out there for companies I’ve consulted for and being able to (securely) remotely administrate it, and all the cool add-ons and plugins you can stick in this thing make it absolutely wonderful.
If I get a chance this weekend or next, I plan on installing freeradius on my pfSense box to use it in conjunction with my wireless. Should be a fun thing to do.
Win7 upgrade – silly, yet boring
Well, I bought a new computer about a month ago or so, and got my Win7 upgrade disc today. I’ve got Vista on one drive, and Fedora 12 on the other (Vista is around for gaming and that’s about it). So I decided to go through the steps of the Win7 upgrade. Well.. the HP assistant stuff was ok. Trying to upgrade Win7 though resulted in this error: “Windows Setup cannot find a location to store temporary installation files. To install Windows, make sure that a partition on your boot disk has at least 938 megabytes (MB) of free space.”
After booting into Clean Boot mode, same error. My Vista drive has 1TB of space, with about 800GB free. But… my boot drive is the other TB drive with Fedora 12 on it, and obviously Windows can’t write to it. Seems a little brain-dead that Windows wouldn’t write temporary files to *it’s* primary drive, doesn’t it? Going into the BIOS to change the boot drive from Fedora to Windows did the trick. Isn’t this OS supposed to be intelligent though?
Otherwise the upgrade was uneventful… mind you, the only apps I have installed are NWN2, D&D Online, Firefox, and Cygwin so I guess there’s not a lot to mess up in there. Pretty uneventful.
And it totally looks like Vista. I guess the visual enhancements must be *really* subtle.
Windows 7 House Party
No, I’m not throwing one although it would be amusing… sad thing is, I’m geekish and all my friends know it, and a large majority of them (also sadly) use Windows yet I think if I threw a Windows 7 house party… no one would show. I’m quite certain all my friends would think it silly. Heck, I’d have more luck getting people to my place if I threw a Partylite candle party!
But, the whole thing is highly amusing. First, you have to look at the videos. These are priceless. I must know how much you get paid to look so dang happy showing people the marvels of an innovative “search” feature. Seriously, you need to check these out. I can’t say they’re good for a laugh… they’re not. But they’re certainly bewildering and bewitching… like… well, nothing comes to mind. But don’t watch the introductory video (well, if you must, go for it)… it’s long and I was almost crying by the end of it. Yeah, it’s that bad. Here it is: Windows 7 house party host help videos.
The reason why I post this isn’t to necessarily mock Microsoft. They’re doing a fine job of that themselves. But I wanted to point out an absolutely brilliant piece of journalism that was written because of these videos and is extremely amusing. (Thanks Maurice for posting the link on the ELUG list!). Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?.
I’ll forgive you if you don’t watch the videos. Only a morbid fascination had me watch three of them (and by then it was just so patently ridiculous I couldn’t justify spending another moment watching more), but this article is pure genius. Some of the comments are mighty amusing as well.
Blackberry Storm Themes
I was hunting around yesterday to find some themes for my Blackberry Storm. When I first got it, there was one theme to choose from, but now there’s a whole bunch of them, so I figured I’d note them here so I don’t have to look for them again when I get bored of the ones I downloaded. My big thing was having a Today theme… that made my Storm seem much less than the previous Blackberry I had, but I have my Today view again!
The first site has to be viewed from the Blackberry: www.themestorm.net/. I actually haven’t checked this one out. The second is a list on the crackberry forums. If you look at this list, there are a tonne of themes of available. I’ve only looked at the the Gears of War theme and some iBerry theme (supposed to make the Blackberry look like an iPhone I guess).
Mac, Linux, Windows, YouTube.. scary
Was poking around and found some amusing “get a mac” ads on YouTube, done SouthPark style:
OMG… YouTube is scary. You should check out this fellow trying to explain Why Linux is Better Than Windows. I think this guy wrote his script, drank a lot, and then made the video.
Oh, and he has trouble saying Mandriva. Is it really that hard?
hehe… I can’t stop laughing… Anyways, it frightens me just who is preaching Linux.. I’m not cure I’d buy anything from this guy.
